Released June 19, 2025 as free (cc) digital download and in beautiful limited digipak CD edition.

The Bridge of Many Shapes is my "dreaming" of a Southern-Eurasian Balkan psycho-archeology by means of sound. Dreaming is meant here in terms of the songlines of Aboriginal Australians who, while traveling, foot after foot, sing the tribal ancestor creature's dreaming into the geography anew, communing with landscape, ghosts and epoch-defining spirit animals. This is an act of decolonization: a dissolving of the present moment of materialist culture and an entry into oneiric antiquity, an imaginary return to and travels within the homeland of my ancestors once adrift in the Cucuteni-Trypillian corridor (dating back to 6,000 BC perhaps eariler). A shamanic journey in sound back through the mirror of the earth feeling for the "spirit bone" or bone-spirit or bone-flute of this apparently mute or muted culture.

Regarding the spirit-bone-flute as an echo manifesto of a song that derives from elemental forces in nature, as I hear it in my work, the following words from Guyanese writer Wilson Harris seem relevant, taken from his notes to his first novel: "Palace of the Peacock":

"It is necessary to outline, as succinctly as I can, the archetypal ground and numinosity of tradition infusing, so to speak, the bone-spirit or bone-flute. The latter is an uncanny termination of a bridge of rhythm arcing or curving from pre-Columbian Mexico into the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian Guianas in South America. At the ancient Mexican origin or genesis of the bridge is the apparition of Quetzalcoatl (quetzal, the heavenly bird and coatl, the wise serpent). The bird-wing of the bridge flies in space, half-seen within the rhythms of space, partially unseen. The scale of the serpent orchestrates minutiae of soil and rain which fill crevices in the body of the earth, river beds, caves, oceans. The serpent is tidal, it is oceanic, it is terrestrial. Further along the bridge is Kukulcan, the obscure ancestor of the migrating species... Next arises Hurakan (Hurricane) who shakes the bridge to its foundations and demolishes worlds... then comes Yurokan, the termination of the bridge or the storyline of the bone flute..."

In my "Bridge of Many Shapes" there are parallel companion creatures, ley-lines, telluric forces guiding me in my composition and execution, along the rivers to the Black Sea. --Jeff Gburek

For details about the archeological background and Jeff's ethnopoetic resources please follow the link to his blog:
transparent-abelard.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-bridge-of-many-shapes-release-notes.html

Composed and produced by Jeff Gburek

Cover artwork by Jeff Gburek and Ivo Petrov

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